A Quantitative Criterion for Defining Planets

A simple metric can be used to determine whether a planet or exoplanet can clear its orbital zone during a characteristic time scale, such as the lifetime of the host star on the main sequence. This criterion requires only estimates of star mass, planet mass, and orbital period, making it possible to immediately classify 99% of all known exoplanets. All 8 planets and all classifiable exoplanets satisfy the criterion. This metric may be useful in generalizing and simplifying the definition of a planet.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal; 7 pages, 6 figure

Slaves out of context: domestic slavery and the Anglo-Indian family, c. 1780–1830

This paper explores the place of domestic slaves in British families resident in India, c. 1780–1830, and the ways in which the presence of slaves within these Anglo-Indian households challenged British understandings of slavery as a practice. Drawing upon probate data, private correspondence and the Parliamentary Papers, it suggests that the history of slavery in the British empire must be situated within wider histories of family, household and kin. Located within the family and often conflated with servants, domestic slaves in Anglo-India came to be seen as dependent female subordinates whose gender and status placed them outside the emerging politics of emancipation

Farming and Eating

This essay argues that the “us versus them” rhetoric that dominates food and agriculture policy today drives a wedge between farmers and food consumers. Together, farmers and food consumers could form a powerful coalition to challenge the true obstacle to sustainable and equitable food production: concentration of market and political power elsewhere along the food chain

Colonial gifts : family politics and the exchange of goods in British India, c.1780 –1820

This paper situates Anglo-Indian gifts within a spectrum of emotionally-charged exchange mechanisms through which material objects circulated in British India. At one end of this spectrum was the market, perhaps best exemplified by the public auctions at which the personal possessions of deceased Anglo-Indians were sold to any buyer who could pay the purchase price set at probate. At the other end of the spectrum of exchange were gifts, commissions and bequests, forms of exchange that offered the British colonial elite mechanisms for combating the powerful centrifugal forces that operated within Anglo-Indian families—most notably disease, death and distance